Moral Disorder.
How does one rate a book? Online, a rating may mean the person enjoyed (or did not enjoy) the story or appreciated (or did not appreciate) the author's craft. It could also mean they thought the protagonist was a big meanie and therefore the book sucks. I once read a poor review of Tom Anderson's Chasing Dean, which I'd rather enjoyed, and found that the reviewer mostly ranted about the author's perceived political agenda, based on the contents of a couple of chapters. The reviewer read a book about hurricane-chasing surfers and verbosely complained that (1) Anderson had positive things to say about New Orleans and (2) he accepts that global warming is real.
Terrible book. Clearly.
So how do I rate? Tricky. I recently completed Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder, a collection of short fiction that borders on becoming both novel and memoir. How did I arrive at my rating?
If I rated it solely on the author's style, I would give it a five-- Goodreadsspeak for "It was excellent!" The young poet who first drew attention in the 1960s never seems far away, regardless of what Atwood writes. Well, mostly. The Testaments fails in this regard. Personal response? The stories/chapters were uneven. They drifted and left me a little cold. Appropriate for Canlit. Much of it reads like imitation Alice Munro, and not even Atwood gets to be Alice Munro. I would then have to say "I liked it," a three at Goodreads.
Suppose I reflected on its best moments? The collection concludes with "The Boys at the Lab." A compelling, powerful piece, it has the narrator reflecting on her parents' final years, trying to reconstruct the parts of their lives she does not recall or know through old photographs and their own fading memories. When both fail, she turns to fiction. Storytelling shapes us-- but the fictions we believe remain beautiful and dangerous. Their reality is a con.
So, a four. Apparently, I "really liked it!!"
Margaret Atwood (who, in reality, has no reason to care about my opinion of her books, even if she knew them) has made forays into SF, but she's never embraced the label. I doubt we'll ever see her at a science fiction convention.
I, however, look forward to returning to Penguicon this spring, hitting an actual hotel, running real-world panels, and meeting other fans and writers and makers and hackers without the mediation of a screen or the threat of Zoom-bombers. The threat of COVID remains, but its power has been diminished significantly. I've attended this con many times and always appeared on panels, but 2022 will be my first appearance as an actual Convention Guest. I have a reading, a revisiting of my Sub/Urban Folklore presentation, and a handful of panels.